DEPARTMENT OF STATE.

426 DECLARATION OF WAB AGAINST GERMANY.
ship. It was not upon their impulse that their government
acted in entering this war. It was not with their
previous knowledge or approval. It was a war determined
upon as wars used to be determined upon in the
old, unhappy days when peoples were nowhere consulted
by their rulers and wars were provoked and waged in the
interest of dynasties or of little groups of ambitious men
who were accustomed to use their fellow men as pawns
and tools. Self-governed nations do not fill their neighbour
states with spies or set the course of intrigue to bring
about some critical posture of affairs which will give
them an opportunity to strike and make conquest. Such
designs can be successfully worked out only under cover
and where no one has the right to ask questions. Cunningly
contrived plans of deception or aggression, carried,
it may be, from generation to generation, can be worked
out and kept from the light only within the privacy of
courts or behind the carefully guarded confidences of a
narrow and privileged class. They are happily impossible
where public opinion commands and insists upon full
information concerning all the nation's affairs.
A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained
except by a partnership of democratic nations. No autocratic
government could be trusted to keep faith within
it or observe its covenants. It must be a league of
honour, a partnership of opinion. Intrigue would eat
its vitals away; the plottings of inner circles who could
plan what they would and render account to no one would
be a corruption seated at its very heart. Only free
peoples can hold their purpose and their honour steady
to a common end and prefer the interests of mankind to
any narrow interest of their own.
Does not every American feel that assurance has been
added to our hope for the future peace of the world by
the wonderful and heartening things that have been
happening within the last few weeks in Russia ? Russia
was known by those who knew it best to have been
always in fact democratic at heart, in all the vital habits
of her thought, in all the intimate relationships of her
people that spoke their natural instinct, their habitual
attitude towards life. The autocracy that crowned the
summit of her political structure, long as it had stood
and terrible as was the reality of its power, was not in
fact Russian in origin, character, or purpose; and now it
has been shaken off and the great, generous Russian
people have been added in all their naive majesty and
might to the forces that are fighting for freedom in the
world, for justice, and for peace. Here is a fit partner
for a League of Honour.
One of the things that has served to convince us that
the Prussian autocracy was not and could never be our
friend is that from the very outset of the present war it
has filled our unsuspecting communities and even our
offices of government with spies and set criminal intrigues
everywhere afoot against our national unity of counsel,
our peace within and without, our industries and our
commerce. Indeed it is now evident that its spies were